Advice to aspiring authors generally includes the exhortation to develop a thick skin, to serve as a shield at numerous points during the writer's career: finding an agent, finding a publisher, dealing with multiple editors' notes and queries, absorbing churlish reviews, parrying readers' complaints and deflecting the idiocies of prize juries. It is good advice. But is there a skin that could possibly have protected the nascent novelist from this note?
"I honestly don't think it is a publishable proposition ... [it] doesn't really begin to be a novel ... I think publishers would also object to there being no chapter divisions, the multitude of mis-spellings, and the fact that a great many words can only exist in your own imagination. Thinking about it dispassionately, and forgetting that we are friends, I cannot help feeling that the book doesn't have much to say at all. My greatest quarrel, however, is with the quality of the writing, which lacks the imagery and force necessary to lift it out of the rut."
